I probably could’ve posted this a few days ago, but I wanted to wait until the Beta Class Balance Analysis thread had run its course before doing so. It’s probably not over (or at least not close to being over), but since its the weekend I felt I should summarize all of the Guardian related information that came out of it. Don’t worry Bears, Fasc, Hinalover, and I are working hard to make sure we aren’t broken or useless at launch ^.^

So what have we learned thus far?

“I did make a bug report out of this though I am re-posting this here just for future reference. there is currently a bug with Faerie Swarms’ damage.”

This is fixed in a future build.

Hinalover had found a bug where if a Guardian cast FFF while having the Faerie Swarm talent, it would do the amount of damage that it currently does on live (10.8% AP) instead of the amount of damage it’s supposed to do. GC sez it will be fixed in a future build.

“Also what is the status of crit suppression? Is it totally gone? Just gone for spells? Or still there? It’s something that is extremely painful to test in-game.”

Crit chances of players against mobs that are higher level than you are reduced by 1% per level difference, in Mists.

This won’t mean anything to you unless you’re in the business of modeling things (like us). Basically when you attack a higher level thing than you the chance you have to critically hit that target is reduced by 1% per 1 level difference. So for a level 90 attacking a boss level mob, your critical strike chance is actually 3% less than what your character sheet says.

“I’m still in the early stages for Guardian but as of this point bears will only need to gear for dodge > crit > hit/exp > haste > Mastery up to 6 rage per second. This allows for at least 1 stack of Savage Defense will be available at all time. Beyond 6 Rage Per Second you will get to 0 stacks at some point during the fight. Beyond 6 RPS, uptime on SD only grows minisculely beyond 60% (6.66 RPS – 61.16% uptime; 7.5 RPS – 61.33% uptime; 10 RPS – 61.6% uptime) For example, with 6.666 RPS, we can use Savage Defense every 9 seconds up to 3 minutes into the fight. Afterwards we can use it every 10 seconds.”

While there is effectively a ‘cap’ on converting rage to Savage Defenses uptime (as you describe, that’s effectively 6.666 RPS to use it on charge cooldown), that should translate to a very ‘soft’ cap on hit/exp/crit, as streaks of rage gain and rage drought may occur. And, more importantly, Frenzied Regeneration should provide a very attractive value in bleeding off excess rage, which is effectively uncapped. Our current design is that against difficult content, Savage Defense provides more average damage mitigation than Frenzied Regeneration heals, but given that it is avoidance (and thus not necessarily reliable), you will sometimes resort to using Frenzied Regeneration to smooth over spikes when you feel you need to. The goal in terms of feeling is that you should ‘want’ to use Savage Defense as much as possible, but sometimes you ‘need’ to Frenzied Regeneration to respond to unexpected spikes in damage.

Here GC talks about the intended usage of our “active mitigation” buttons (I know that Frenzied Regeneration isn’t actually mitigation, but it still “handles” damage). I assume that most Guardians in beta already knew all of this, but for everyone out there that has basically tuned out until launch it will be good to know. Even though you may reach the “very soft” cap of 6.66~ RPS, you’re still going to want as much Rage as you can get because any excess can be bled off into Frenzied Regeneration.

“2) Overlapping Mangle procs.
3) Thrash 6 second CD.
4) Dead GCDs.”

The proc to reset the cooldown on Mangle from Thrash, Lacerate, and Faerie Fire now all occur on initial hit, instead of on bleed ticks. It should no longer be possible to get multiple procs within the same GCD, or to have any benefit from purposely leaving GCDs empty. Can you offer any further details about how the rotation can be gamed in these sort of ways?

This was a direct reply to my complaint that having Mangle reset off of bleed ticks basically meant you performed upkeep on bleeds while mashing Mangle. Thankfully they’ve changed the model to where Mangle resets off of your attacks that hit a target instead. I hope they take it a bit farther and add some more spice to Thrash and Lacerate, but this is a MASSIVE step forwards in terms of fun for the Guardian “rotation”. I use “rotation” in quotes because again it’s actually a priority system, but hey.

“Currently Cenarion Ward will not consume the healing bonus from Dream of Cenarius. This makes Dream of Cenarius completely and totally undesirable for Guardians. That may be intentional, but some clarification would be appreciated.”

This is a bug; all three level 30 talents will benefit from the increased healing buff from Dream of Cenarius. For example, a Guardian druid in Bear Form, with Dream of Cenarius and Renewal, who has recently Mangled a target so they have the Dream of Cenarius buff up, can hit Renewal to instantly restore 51% of their max health. We just fixed it to apply to Renewal and Cenarion Ward a few minutes ago, though, so you won’t see that for a build or two.

This is something I noticed right when I hit 90, and first reported in the Guardian feedback thread. Apparently it’s a bug and Dream of Cenarius is supposed to interact with Cenarion Ward – which is kinda what I suspected from the beginning. So if the Stamina buff is removed from Heart of the Wild, Dream of Cenarius could actually see some interesting use. Or even Renewal.

“Glyph of Fae Silence, I keep asking this and never get a response I hope I can get one here. Is it intentional that Fae Silence does not work on targets already affected by Faerie Fire or is it a bug?”

Bug.

If FFF was already on a target and you have the glyph of Fae Silence, you couldn’t cast it again on that target. This was potentially very detrimental to Guardians and I’m glad it’s getting fixed.

Additionally, Shield Slam and Revenge will only generate rage in Defensive Stance in a future build. We want to leave some room for Prot warriors to go into Battle Stance when OT’ing or perhaps when solo, and we want to leave some room for Arms and Fury to use Defensive Stance when emergency tanking.

I realize that this is not directly related to Guardians, but let me explain why its here. I posted in the past asking similar questions about Guardian Bear and Guardian Cat, but never received a response (other than a lot of trolling from Saulsilver). If this is expected – and even encouraged – of Warriors, I’d imagine there is a similar desire for Guardians. I asked as much, but have not yet received a response. As it stands now Guardian Cat is ~20% under 0 Vengeance Guardian Bear, so stay tuned for more developments in this area.

“Lastly, I think there needs to be some change to the guardian cooldowns so that we can actually use them on most attempts in raid PvE without having to worry if it will be wasted on a wipe. I won’t rehash all of the proposed solutions because that’s been done enough, but with DS tier being replaced by new gear I am worried about going back to the way things used to be.”

We have new tech to reset certain long cooldowns that you’re sometimes tempted to wait around for before each pull (such as Summon Doomguard), when you wipe on an encounter. This tech hasn’t been hooked up to every encounter yet, but you should be able to see this work on some encounters (such as Stone Guard on this Friday). This won’t apply to every long cooldown. Our current rule of thumb is that it applies to cooldowns longer than 5min, but no longer than 10min, but there will be some exceptions to that. It is going to be very subjective which cooldowns are included, but again our rule of thumb is: would reasonable groups kill time waiting for this cooldown to finish before starting an encounter? Please don’t lobby for every cooldown you have to be included. :)

In case you didn’t read that whole response, it basically boils down to: “We’re looking at implementing automatic CD resets for long cooldowns.” You should read that as: “Rebirth.” FUCK YEAH!

Unfortunately there hasn’t yet been anything about the multitude of problems with Heart of the Wild, but given the amount of information we’ve received over the past couple of days I’m confident they are looking at it.

2 Comments

You guys should be hired by Blizzard because you do all the maths that they can’t or don’t have the “brains” for it… Thanks for the summary above,keep up the good work and preventing that our class derail again by Blizzard great game designers.